New Technology May Detect Parkinson's With A Phone Call

Published 9:12 am, Monday, January 28, 2013

While at Oxford, mathematician Max Little developed an algorithm to detect voice disorders. When he tried those algorithms to detect Parkinson's disease, he did so with about 86 percent accuracy, he writes on The Huffington Post.

Now, the Parkinson's Voice Initiative is in the process of analyzing 10,000 voices collected using the standard telephone network.

"This incredible and unique dataset will tell us whether it is possible to use something as ubiquitous as the telephone to detect and monitor the disease," Little writes. "This now becomes a 'big data' analysis problem, and until the analysis is done, we can't know for sure if it will work."

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Somewhere between four and six million people worldwide suffer from Parkinson's disease. The current form of testing is very costly, time-consuming, and logistically difficult, Little says. If this technology actually works, it would be possible to test roughly 75 percent of the world's population at a very small cost.